Galerie Max Hetzler is delighted to announce Grids: Numbers and Trees III, and Palm Trees II, the gallery’s first exhibition with Charles Gaines.

Los Angeles - based artist Charles Gaines has engaged in conceptual art for four decades. Critical thinking is central to his practice that includes photographs and drawings plotted out on grids. His work is informed by various sources, from John Cage, Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings, German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, to the esoteric philosophy of Tantric Buddhism, Marxism, semiotics and post-colonial theories.

Gaines has found systematic ways of “generating imagery”, working in series and plotting numbers on grids, thus questioning representation. His approach is a formal way of breaking down images into serial patterns. Gaines is interested in the gap that emerges between the systems and the charted subjects by analogy on the one hand and with rational thoughts of perception.

The exhibition features two series of works. Numbers and Trees started in 1985, more than ten years after the Walnut Tree Orchard series (1975-2014) where Charles Gaines first studied the tree as a subject. Gaines had initially painted trees on acrylic sheets but was not satisfied with the result as he wanted to find a way to take the ego out of the painting. Hence his aim at looking for a systematic means of “shaping a form”, at times layering the sheets over black-and-white landscape pictures. The trees are a combination of differently painted squares that are numbered according to their location on the sheet. For the Central Park series, Gaines started by photographing trees at this specific location. The silhouette of the tree is plotted on a grid that has been printed on a Plexiglas sheet layered over the black and white landscape pictures. The branches are delimited through the use of intensely coloured squares and numbers are not visible from afar. Only a closer look reveals the different digits and encourages the viewer to participate and reflect upon the representational system.
The series successively plots the shape of trees of different hue on one another, moving further away from a singular tree and closer to a tree as a generic type.

The Palm Trees series started in 2015. As with Number and Trees, the shape of a tree is plotted in numbers on a grid, further exploring the serialization of a set of analogous images. The series
consists of four ink of paper drawings based on photographs of palm trees, each unique.

Once again, the tree appears to be almost a generic subject for a number of artists. From Cezanne and Mondrian to recent paintings by Albert Oehlen or the recurrent ones in Ai Weiwei’s practice.

Carlos Cruz-Diez is a historic protagonist of the kinetic and optical art movements. In October 2016 he dialogued with the architecture of Auguste Perret (“Un être flottant,” Palais d’Iéna, Paris) via monumental environments made especially for the site or adapted to it. This exhibition at Galerie Mitterrand, also curated by Matthieu Poirier, is the retrospective counterpoint to that event, featuring over thirty key works by this artist born in Caracas in 1923. These paintings, reliefs and environments made between the 1950s and the present demonstrate the constant exploration of colour as a spatial and sensorial phenomenon by this artist now aged 93 – the investigation of colour as that “floating creature” dreamed of by Wassily Kandinsky.

Trained at the fine arts school in Caracas, where he obtained his professorial diploma in 1945, Cruz-Diez spent the 1950s between Caracas, Barcelona and Paris, eventually settling in the French capital. It was in 1954 that his work took on abstract turn, and when the artist began his constant challenging of the support’s sensorial passivity. His Proyectos murales (1954), abstract reliefs in the tradition of Sophie Tauber-Arp’s Neoplasticism, were painted in primary colours and stood out from their immaculate support as a result of the ambient light and its variations. Equally surprising is the fact that the salient elements of these reliefs could be freely handled by viewers. In 1955 the intertwining structures of the Parénquimas series had elements of both Informel art and cellular microscopy. In 1956 this play of meshes took a more geometrical turn and the surface of the painting, covered with elongated triangles painted in violently clashing primary colours, producing powerful effects of visual instability. These works also prefigure the system of vertical, parallel lines that continues to obtain in the artist’s most recent pieces.

For Cruz-Diez, the fixity of the composition, even when abstract, is simply one more image, a new iconography, as symbolical and narrative, and even anecdotal, as figurative art. As of 1958 the artist saw a way out of this impasse in the colour theories formulated by Ogden Rood and Eugène Chevreul in the 19th century and applied in the Neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat, the Analytical Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the Futurism of Giacomo Balla and the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, from which movements he took his own use of vibration, acceleration and suspension. He is just as fascinated by the most recent scientific discoveries, with modern graphics, photography and reprography on one side, and optics, cognitive psychology and the phenomenology of perception on the other. For Cruz-Diez, the work of art must be “kinetic” and “dynamogenic”: in other words, the visual element, if not necessarily mobile itself, must elicit movement – a motor reaction – in the beholder. Also, and above all, it must produce the “atmospheric” sensation of an impalpable phenomenon, that of a pure colour floating in physical space and, especially, between the eye and the brain, in the psycho-physiological field of perception.

In the 1960s and 70s, this aesthetic orientation acquired a political or, we might say, democratic connotation in the artist’s work, in that it challenged the artistic hierarchy for which the artwork (or its creator) is seen as more important than the beholder. His idea of active participation, that is, of involving a volitional body that is not just subjected to a message, even a symbolic one, is explored in various ways in Cruz-Diez’s series, not in accordance with themes or subjects, but following various colour-related phenomena, processes or methods (as of the late 1950s, the prefix chromo- began to be included almost systematically in his titles). This exhibition sets out to convey the different facets of the artist’s world as fully as possible, with pictures (Couleurs additives, from 1959 and Inductions chromatiques from 1963) that are painted, silkscreened or, in recent years, printed from electronic files. Cruz-Diez employs the inventive potential of technology in order to achieve what one could describe as a “surgical” formal precision, the aim being to constantly improve the work’s sensorial effectiveness. These elements also concern his reliefs (the Physichromies, from 1959). Most of these do not actually consist of a three-dimensional form projecting from a ground but an entire plane divided into a multiplicity of fine vertical partitions, themselves constituted by strips made from various materials (cardboard, Plexiglas, metal, etc.) and held perpendicular to the vertical support.

From work on the plane whose colour palpitates and spreads into space, via environments that play on architectural elements, Cruz-Diez pursues a singular conception of abstraction that one could describe as “Heraclitean”: we never bathe in the same river twice. These works embody a similar idea of flux, in which colour is not a given state but a mutation that is continuous in real time and space (although it is, regrettably, inevitably interrupted in photographic documents). This palpable transformation, with no final state, no analysable, concrete result, is obtained by systematic, programmed and modular variations, instead of “pictorial,” subjective or gestural ones.

Today, the powerful computer industry likes to see the kinetic, optical, perceptual and participatory art of people like Cruz-Diez as the forerunner of digital or interactive art. And yet the authentic, direct – as opposed to mediated – experience of his work tells us the opposite: the viewer is not a pair of eyes on a stick facing a painting, but a mobile body, experiencing in vivo a work whose sensorial reality has a distinct form for each individual. Now a crucial part of the creative process (the work, says the artist, “does not exist without the viewer”), this beholder at the same time has the experience of the watcher watched, as well as enjoying a kind of aesthetic pleasure that the artist has always sought to make equivalent to the one provided by music. It would be a mistake to see the work of Cruz-Diez as simply a clever and playful exploration of colour, for what we have here is nothing less than a revolution of the gaze, a dynamic experience of the elasticity of our perception, when colour is no longer petrified, facing us, but hovers over its support, on the edge of our vision.

NextLevel is proud to announce the first European and Paris solo exhibition by the Winnipeg based artist Karel Funk, known for his mesmerizing portrait paintings of lone figures.

The subtle evolution of Funk’s practice is explored, beginning with the artist’s meditative portraits of hooded figures, responses to conflicting senses of intimacy and anonymity he experienced on New York subways. In his most recent work, the human form is abandoned and replaced by images of bundled, crumpled, and knotted outerwear. The figures that populate most of Funk’s paintings exude a silent contemplation that places them in dialogue with the post-humanist figurative painting tradition: from the Italian and Northern Renaissance to Photorealism. Funk recently opened his first museum retrospective at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Karel Funk (b. 1971) received an MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2003. Funk has had solo museum shows at Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN) in 2009 and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal in 2007. He has participated in several group shows in North America and abroad. Funk’s work is held in major museum collections, including the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Canada, as well as many private collections.
He lives and works in Winnipeg.

Galerie Pact is pleased to announce Laser Erotic, a solo exhibition of installation by Gosia Walton. The exhibition will be her first in Paris. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday , December 7, and the exhibition will remain on view through January 14.

While the laser dances to and fro across a slick acrylic surface, Gosia Walton watches. Clusters of automated incisions are scored with surgical precision and indefatigable dexterity, compulsively replicating the jumbled syntax of an unfamiliar bionic language.
Housed within a series of aluminium walk-through structures resembling half-constructed stud walls, Gosia’s luminous acrylic sheets present semi-transparent surfaces that are flattened depictions of space. Grids, directional arrows, simulations of three-dimensional architecture; all these patterns feel like they are floating in an unreachable virtual realm.

The shapes she asks the laser to etch for her are compiled through a process of corruption. This degenerative relationship between artist and machine is as productive as it is unhealthy. If Gosia is toying with the laser’s copper-fibre-silicone mind, she is equally implicated since she is no longer fully autonomous. The surface seduces. The motion of the laser is exhausting and mesmerising. The shapes come to reproduce themselves, replicating across the acrylic’s perfect flatness. This surreal feeling of automatic repetition suggests not liberation but compulsion. It is difficult to say who is driven by whom, or what lies beyond the pleasure principle.

If Gosia’s complicit relationship with the laser is what drives her to make work, Piotr Kowalski is correct in devising measures to be taken. Her rapidly replicating products will soon surround him, and since she is stimulated by the possibility of technology run amok, she is likely to have the last laugh.
Born out of a short-circuiting of the relationship between artist and machine, perhaps her work serves as a means of self-replication for the corrupted digital data, analogous to way a virus self-assembles within a human cell.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce a forthcoming exhibition featuring the most important sculpture by Marcel Duchamp to be on the market for many years. The Porte-bouteilles (Bottle Rack), dated 1959, is considered one of the most influential sculptures from the 20th century.

The exhibition curated around this seminal work will open in the Paris Marais gallery on 20 October2016, a year which also commemorates the 100th anniversary of the term readymade, that Duchamp first coined in 1916 in a letter to his sister Suzanne.

The exhibition features Marcel Duchamp’s Porte-bouteilles from 1959, the year Robert Rauschenberg bought it for his personal collection – where it remained until it was passed on to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation states: “The Board made the strategic decision to sell this work, which will allow us to create an endowment. Having a more diverse portfolio of cash investments and art will allow us to focus on our core legacy. In this coming year we will be launching the research towards our Catalogue Raisonné - a key project for the Foundation.” Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has been chosen by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to place the sculpture in a public institution allowing for ongoing public viewing and scholarship.

The iconic Porte-bouteilles was considered by Duchamp to be his first readymade. For Duchamp, the readymade meant the transition from what he called “retinal art” to an intellectual approach of his practice. As André Breton wrote in 1938 in his Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, a readymade is an “ordinary object promoted to the dignity of an art object by the mere choice of the artist”.

The first time Duchamp used the term readymade was in 1916 in a letter sent from New York to Paris, addressed to his sister Suzanne where he gave instructions to recuperate a bottle dryer he formerly purchased at the Grand Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville and left in his studio since then. Suzanne was asked to write a specific inscription and sign it, but as history knows, this step was never realized, and the work remained as an idea.

After Duchamp left Europe and moved to New York in 1915, he became a major figure in the city’s art scene, influencing many collectors, curators and especially a new generation of artists. Robert Rauschenberg met Marcel Duchamp in 1953 at the Stable Gallery, the two of them, along with Jasper Johns, became close friends. Sometime between spring 1957 and fall 1958, Johns and Rauschenberg visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see its exceptional Duchamp collection. It is therefore not surprising that the inventor of the readymades saw a natural filiation in their works when declaring in Time magazine six years later: “Abstract expressionism was not intellectual at all for me. It is under the yoke of the retinal; I see no grey matter there. Jasper Johns, one of our lights, and Rauschenberg are much more than that; they have intelligence in addition to painting facilities.”

In 1959, Duchamp and Rauschenberg took part in a group exhibition titled Art and the Found Object at the Time-Life Reception Center in New York, for which Duchamp decided to include his Porte-bouteilles. He asked Man Ray if he could borrow the 1935-36 version, which was supposedly kept in the photographer’s collection in Paris. However Man Ray had lost the object, thus Duchamp encouraged him to buy another one at the Grand Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville and to ship the object to New York. Rauschenberg then acquired the piece for his own collection.

Soon after purchasing this sculpture, he loaned it to the MoMA in New York for the groundbreaking exhibition The Art of Assemblage (1961), which travelled to the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts and to the San Francisco Museum of Art. Since then, this work has been exhibited in important institutions such as the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Together with the Porte-bouteilles the exhibition will show a selection of drawings by Marcel Duchamp as well as other works that relate directly to the object. A drawing offered by the artist to Rauschenberg after a symposium at MoMA in 1960 will be presented. Other loans comprise an edition of The Green Box (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) (1934) and of The Box in a Valise (1964) including original reproductions of the Porte-bouteilles. A hand-written letter by Robert Rauschenberg describing his acquisition and the technical drawing of the object made by an industrial draftsman and supervised by the artist for the production of replicas in 1964 will provide further input to the understanding of the work.

A fully illustrated catalogue of the exhibition will be published with newly commissioned texts by Cecile Debray, curator in charge of modern collections at the Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Paul B. Franklin, specialist on Marcel Duchamp and editor in chief of Étant donné Marcel Duchamp.